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Scientists warn Atlantic current at risk of shutting down

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Re: Scientists warn Atlantic current at risk of shutting down

#141

Post by Izkata »

SoftTalker wrote: post #96
wongarsu wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking back at the amount of snowfall I saw as a kid and the amount of snowfall I see now in my 30s, or at the number of hot summer days ... I find it hard to claim that climate is not changing over a lifetime. 20 years isn't even a lifetime, that's like 1/4th of a lifetime Maybe climate is more stable wherever you live

There's a problem with memories. You can have a snowy week and remember it as the entire winter, if it affected you in particularly memorable ways. Kids usually get out of school and play building snowmen and having snowball fights. When I was a kid in the midwest USA, 100 degrees in the summer happened every once in a while. Still does. July and August were always hot. Still are. As a kid the heat didn't bother me s…

Likewise in the winter, as a kid in the 90s I remember my dad wondering if we'd have a white Christmas (wondering if snow would fall before Christmas or not). There's even songs from decades earlier about it.

Whether we'd get snow before January has always been a toss-up, and I'd hazard we've gotten it more often recently than when I was a kid. Like about 10 years ago I even remember a huge blizzard in November.

Re: Scientists warn Atlantic current at risk of shutting down

#142

Post by 13415 »

9rx wrote: post #133
13415 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So medicine is not a science because it's concerned with what's "good" and what's "bad" for someone's health? I find this kind of argument principally flawed. Many sciences are concerned with the consequences of human actions and it's hard if not impossible to describe these in meaningful ways without applying some criteria for what outcomes are good (desirable, positively evaluated) and what outcomes are bad (not de…

> So medicine is not a science because it's concerned with what's "good" and what's "bad" for someone's health? It is concerned with understanding health. It is unable to decide what is "good" or "bad" as that is in the eye of the beholder. That is why medicine presents the options gleaned from the gained understanding, leaving the individual to decide for themselves what is "good" amid all the different tradeoffs. T…

You're nitpicking. Medicine is concerned with what's good and bad for someone's health. Medical doctors literally advise their patients on that and evaluate the effects of actions with respect to what's good and what's bad for their health. What's good and bad for someone's health is simply one form of instrumental goodness. Other sciences evaluate in similar ways, though they are perhaps concerned with other aspects of what's good and bad. Climate scientists are not concerned with what's good and bad for mankind in some abstract philosophical way, but they should without a doubt lay out good or bad consequences of climate change. If the temperature sinks by 10 degrees Celsius in Northern Europe, that would be a bad consequence for the affected countries.

It's false and somewhat naive to claim that such evaluations play no role in science, they are a crucial part of many sciences. For instance, they're needed to find worthwhile subjects of study. Not everything is theoretical physics.

Re: Scientists warn Atlantic current at risk of shutting down

#143

Post by fatuna »

9rx wrote: post #58
stouset wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What, exactly, do you expect scientists researching these things to do? Bury their findings?

I suppose they could refrain from injecting their feelings into it. The science doesn't change if it is presented as simple information and not as a warning.

Who then should inject their feelings? Journalists don't care because it's too abstract, politicians don't care because it won't happen in their term, business doesn't care because there's no money to be made, and the people don't care because of all of the above people telling them to ignore it.

Re: Scientists warn Atlantic current at risk of shutting down

#144

Post by keybored »

jlarocco wrote: post #140
keybored wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> conspiracy theory What is the name for the theory that the most fantastically wealthy do not rule society? No kind adjectives come to mind.

At the end of the day it's unsustainable consumption of resources and increasing generation of waste that's killing the planet. Even if the 4000 billionaires are ruling society, they're destroying the planet with the help of 8 billion poors.

At the end of the day it’s bullets fired from rifles, mortars, artillery shells, cruise ship missiles, etc. that are killing people in war.

If the executive branch of the government is commanding the military, and generals are commanding the military, they’re killing people with the help of tens of thousands of soldiers.

Re: Scientists warn Atlantic current at risk of shutting down

#145

Post by dualvariable »

unethical_ban wrote: post #88
MSFT_Edging wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The forest where the community hikes has no value unless the trees are turned into paper. All to say, Capital at large seeks out the profit. Until climate change effects the profit considerably, mitigation will be the path less traveled. The only real way to approach this problem is to reduce consumption across the board which as you might guess, isn't profitable.

Which is why, to be blunt, libertarians and conservatives are wrong to demonize government without being equally or more skeptical of the corrupting power of money. Government is the only apparatus that can govern unregulated motivations of capital, and we need regulations on pollution and investments in clean energy and waste creation/collection to stop things like climate change. Gen X and forward grew up in a worl…

Yeah, this is why I'm not a Libertarian. Concentrated power in the hands of single individuals impacts the freedom and liberty of everyone else. That holds if the person is the head of government, or the CEO of a corporation.

Re: Scientists warn Atlantic current at risk of shutting down

#146

Post by Tyrubias »

jlarocco wrote: post #129
Tyrubias wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a cold-hearted way to think about it. The countless people who will suffer are not the ones causing the problem. The problem is caused by the billionaires willing to sacrifice human life and the environment for profit. They actively sow climate skepticism and encourage defunding of climate research to protect their bottom line. When extreme weather events kill millions, those billionaires will be safe in thei…

It's easier to blame climate change on a conspiracy theory around billionaires then it is to stop driving so much and reduce consumption.

At least in the US, many people have to drive because US metropolitan areas are car-centric and lack public transit. This, in turn, is a direct result of lobbying by powerful companies like oil producers and automobile manufacturers.

As for your point about reducing consumption, there has been a deliberate effort by billionaire-controlled corporations to increase consumption. This has been done through a variety of methods, including limiting repairability, deliberate planned obsolescence through things like fast fashion and equipment designed to break down, and psychological manipulation to encourage consumption. Small ‘d’ democratic efforts to limit these techniques have been defeated by powerful lobbies backed by these billionaires.

Billionaires aren’t just responsible for consumption-driven climate change, they’re also responsible for subverting the democratic processes that could have reversed it at large scales.

Re: Scientists warn Atlantic current at risk of shutting down

#147

Post by grey-area »

bastawhiz wrote: post #104
grey-area wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The risk was 5% and is now above 50% according to experts in the field. Given the significant consequences this is worth paying attention to.

The GP didn't say not to pay attention to it. Clearly people are. The point is that it's unactionable. The people who care could all pour their life savings into climate action and commit suicide to cancel all future carbon footprint and it still wouldn't move the needle. Even if the Democrats in the US took over both branches of Congress, the white house, and the supreme court, they wouldn't move the needle. There i…

I don’t think it’s unactionable, just as one example, sadly investing in Northern Europe on a long time frame is pretty risky as a result of this.

There is and should be pressure to decarbonise at this point - it is still going to help and we can vote to make that happen.

Tyrants like Putin want you to think you are powerless, but you are not.

Re: Scientists warn Atlantic current at risk of shutting down

#148

Post by ordu »

bastawhiz wrote: post #117
stouset wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What, exactly, do you expect scientists researching these things to do? Bury their findings?

The scientists aren't journalists. Convince a politician to start planning for national security considerations. Tell them how it'll affect supply chains. Frame it in a way that literally anyone who has a vested interest in doing something would care about.

It is easier said than done. Politicians do not like to be disturbed by some pesky experts. Mentor Pilot discusses 2025 D.C mid-air collision[1], and finds the most disturbing reason for it: experts tried to escalate issues with too much traffic for years, but they were repeatedly told that it was "too political", so, in other words "just shut up and deal with the traffic, don't bother congressmen and congresswomen, they are too important to be bothered with limits of possible stemming from physics or engineering".

Politicians thought (and some think to this day) that climate warming is "too political" to listen to experts. Most of them will think that Atlantic current is too political, till it stops.

It is easy to say "convince a politician", but it is hard to do. Politicians think politics, and you have to be a genius among politicians to transform a game field, so some concerns of scientists became a political issue that is not possible to ignore. Geniuses among politicians as as rare as in any other discipline, the most of them will just play existing games, without even thinking of rewriting the rules of the game. BTW, when they try to rewrite, the boring old "play by the rules" might start to look pretty good.

Politics is the hardest unsolved problem the humanity faces. We could send humans to the Moon, or it seems increasingly likely we can create an AGI, but we can't make politicians to listen to the reason.

[1] https://youtu.be/41UYPeTr96s

Re: Scientists warn Atlantic current at risk of shutting down

#149

Post by kocsonya »

zurfer wrote: post #52
kocsonya wrote: post #2

Hot take on HN, but techno-optimism sounds so stupid when it comes to climate change... You can't engineer macro climate/ecology, since capital has no interest in human and it's surrounding environment balanced cohabitation.

Techno optimist here who expects the following to make a big contribution to reducing human made future climate change: better batteries+solar/wind, nuclear fusion, self driving cars (we'll need to manufacture less cars for the same amount of miles humanity drives), AI helping with better resource allocation in general (hopefully). The answer can't be, let's just consume 10x less. We have to engineer our way out of i…

To make energy requires not only a lot of time to be produced, but also a lot of energy to get it done. Industrial society is based on these "oil reserves" from the Mesozoic Era. All the stuff made in factories from the 19th century all the way to iPhones 17s relies on these diminishing EROI — which, instead of being underground, is now in our atmosphere. It's not like a jar on a shelf we can just take off because by the time the energy transfers through the ecosystem all the way it hits where the ecosystem the most fragile, melting the taiga and lowering the albedo.

Re: Scientists warn Atlantic current at risk of shutting down

#150

Post by idiotsecant »

Izkata wrote: post #135
bastawhiz wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the things are happening though. That's what the headlines said the last 49 times. Why should the average person care now ? What are they supposed to do? Al Gore got on a scissor lift and showed the hockey stick graph. Millions of people saw it. Then the data was bad. Then the average person didn't see anything happen that they could point to and be like "That's what Al Gore warned us about". What you're asking for…

It's like the climate people never heard the fable of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf". It's exactly that.

Who are 'The climate people' you seem to think are doing this? Do you think there is a club where the climate people president takes a vote from the climate people council on how many news stories hacknews user Izkata should read?

If you lived under a big precarious rock and people always talked about the big rock falling on you would you ignore the big rock because the big rock people keep crying wolf?

This is honestly the most baffling worldview.

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